‘BOSS’ OF THE BAR
WWII hero buried with German soldiers finally gets proper rites at US cemetery
In the five decades he’s been playing at the famed Stone Pony, Bruce Springsteen never asked the bar for a dime — but he sure cost them a pretty penny one night.
The Boss jumped behind the bar of the iconic Asbury Park, NJ, music venue — and made sure patrons drank ’til they got their fill.
“I walked in the front door and saw people around the front bar and there he is behind the bar, handing drinks out to whoever wanted ’em, drunk as a skunk and having the ball of his life,” Jack Roig, the Stone Pony’s owner from 1974 until 1992, told The Post.
And since the Boss didn’t know how to make cocktails, choices were limited and cash sales plummeted.
“Beer and shots, he knew how to do that,” said Roig, 82, laughing at the memory.
The rock ’n’ roll god has long been a patron and performer at the iconic Jersey Shore watering hole, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. It is even the subject of a new book, out June 4, by New York Times correspondent and Garden State native Nick Corasaniti, “I Don’t Want to Go Home: The Oral History of the Stone Pony.”
In the book, Springsteen, 74, confesses, “I wasn’t much of a bartender, but I’d serve up the beers and just have fun with the fans, and just enjoy myself. [My signature] was beer. With a Jack Daniel’s on the side, maybe.”
Roig said Springsteen would usually come by unannounced, but called ahead if he was bringing the E Street Band.
“He said, ‘Can we come down and play?’ — Can you believe that? ‘Can we?’ ” Roig recalled. He would never ask for money. “Never, it was never even suggested. And the building’s maximum legal capacity was 556. Now, tell me how I’m gonna pay a guy that can fill up MetLife Stadium,” said Roig, laughing.
Cover to cover
“One summer, he played here 11 out of 13 Sundays.”
He even tried to pay the bar’s then-$3 cover charge.
“When he was on the cover of Time and Newsweek in the same week [in 1975], he’s down at the end of the line, looking through his pockets to see if he’s got enough money to come in,” Roig said.
Spring Lake, NJ, native Pete Llewellyn worked at the Pony as a bartender from 1979 to 1992, and served Springsteen — who never had to pay for a drink there — his signature kamikazes and Budweiser.
“He’d get four or five kamikazes in him and he’d go up to the band and play for an hour,” Llewellyn, 63, says in the book.
Springsteen, a native of Freehold, NJ, whose 1973 debut album was titled “Greetings from Asbury Park,” rented a garage apartment in Deal, less than two miles from Asbury.
“I think that’s where he wrote a good portion of the ‘Born in the USA’ album. And he would get tired of writing and he would come in and just want to blow some steam off,” Llewellyn told The Post.
Llewellyn could never understand how the word spread so quickly when The Boss showed up.
“It’d be funny because it’d be 200 people in there, which is pretty empty in that place, and Bruce would get on the stage, and before he got off, there’d be 800,” he said.
“He’d pull up in an old, beat-up pickup truck. He would come in, he’d put a red baseball hat on,” he said. “And he would mind his business and people knew not to mob him and make a spectacle of him.”
‘Flirts’ base
Women, however, did try to flirt with him.
“What girl didn’t want to go home with Bruce Springsteen in 1985? Well, I knew one [who did], and she worked there, so I don’t want to mention her name,” Llewellyn said.
He was serving Springsteen when the rocker first laid eyes on his current wife, a Jersey girl named Patti Scialfa, who sang and played guitar.
“He was sitting at the front bar and he stopped what he was doing. He just sat there and was glued to her. He liked what he saw. And I’m not talking physically. He liked the way she sang, he liked her presence,” he recalled.
“After the show he went in the back and they were talking . . . And then, of course, the rest is history.”
Llewellyn’s most treasured Bruce memory is when he came in one Sunday before “Born in the USA” was finished and sang songs off the upcoming record just for employees from 4 until 10 in the morning.
To this day, The Boss receives letters from fans around the world, mailed to the bar.
“It would be addressed to ‘Bruce Springsteen, USA,’ ” Roig said, “and it would be delivered to us.”
A Jewish World War II hero who stormed Utah Beach on D-Day and went missing after being ambushed in the Battle of Cherbourg has finally been found — in a German mass grave where he was buried with Nazis.
Now, eight decades after his death on June 23, 1944, US Army Lt. Nathan Baskind will finally receive a proper burial.
Baskind, the son of Lithuanian and Russian immigrants who settled in Pittsburgh and owned a wallpaper business, was drafted in 1942 at the age of 26, according to Raugh Jewish Archives.
“He came from a successful family, he could have gotten out of [the war] if he wanted to,” said Shalom Lamm, co-founder of Operation Benjamin, a nonprofit that identifies Jewish veterans buried under mistaken religious designations at American military cemeteries.
Missing in action
Baskind commanded four M-10 tank destroyers — modified Sherman tanks — in the Army’s 899th Tank Destroyer battalion during the bloody D-Day invasion. After taking the beachhead, Allied forces set their sights on the French port city of Cherbourg.
As US troops engaged in fierce battles with Nazi soldiers, who were ordered by Adolf Hitler to hold the city at all costs, Baskind went behind enemy lines accompanied only by his driver on a reconnaissance mission.
They were ambushed. The driver managed to get back to Allied lines despite being “seriously wounded,” and told how Baskind had been hit by machine-gun and rifle fire and was presumed dead, according to Baskind’s personnel file at the National Archives.
US troops conducted a thorough search but found “no trace of Lt. Baskind or his vehicle,” the file says. He was listed as missing in action on July 13, 1944, and was promoted posthumously from second to first lieutenant. He was also awarded a Purple Heart.
Baskind’s name was added to the Wall of the Missing at the American Cemetery at Normandy, and what exactly happened to him would remain a mystery for eight decades.
In 2022, a US genealogist touring the German Marigny cemetery happened to notice that among the names of 17 German soldiers on a plaque at a burial mound was one name that didn’t seem to belong — Baskind’s.
He tipped off Operation Benjamin. Lamm and his partner Rabbi Jacob J. Schacter began to investigate, and the sleuths determined it could be the long-missing lieutenant.
The nonprofit’s senior genealogist, Rachel Silverman, then got in touch with the German War Graves Commission, a k a the Volksbund. They dug deep into their archives and unearthed detailed documents that finally shed light on Baskind’s fate.
He was captured after getting shot and brought to a squalid Luftwaffe hospital in Cherbourg known for its “cesspool” conditions. He died the night of his capture.
Bone yard
His remains were dumped in a grave with 24 German soldiers in the hospital’s courtyard. Then, in 1957, the mass grave was exhumed and the remains were combined with those from another mass grave 50 miles away at the German Marigny cemetery. It is there, beneath three Gothic crosses, that Baskind was interred with 52 Nazi soldiers.
German officials discovered Baskind’s dog tag, a patch from the 899th Tank Destroyer Battalion, and lieutenants’ bars. They notified the US Army, which made two unsuccessful attempts to identify the remains. Baskind’s family was informed his body was “unrecoverable” — but they were never told about the Nazi grave.
“You have a Jewish kid from
Pittsburgh buried with these enemy soldiers,” Lamm told The Post, choking back tears.
Lamm and Rabbi Schacter, who teaches at Yeshiva University in upper Manhattan, became determined to recover Baskind’s remains and bring them home to his “family, his people and his country.”
Their mission was personal. Rabbi Schacter’s father, Rabbi Herschel Schacter, was a battlefield chaplain in World War II and the first American rabbi to enter a concentration camp during the liberation of Buchenwald.
“The narrative of my childhood was helping soldiers and helping Jews,” Rabbi Schacter said. “I want to show — especially in today’s climate — that Jews played a role in fighting for America and are prepared to give our lives fighting for America.”
For Lamm, he felt he wouldn’t find peace until Baskind did.
“I had tremendous existential angst, that this kid was not at rest, and was mixed up with the enemy,” Lamm said. “I just couldn’t stop until we finished . . . It just tore at my soul. We had to bring him home, that was it.”
Request denied
They had to navigate many obstacles over the next year.
The two had a cordial meeting with the German ambassador to Israel, Steffan Seibert, to seek permission to exhume the mass grave. But not only did Germany decline, one of Jerusalem’s top rabbis, Osher Weiss, also would not sign off on the plan because there was no known precedent in Jewish law regarding exhuming and reburying partial remains.
“It was just devastating,” Lamm said.
But soon they caught a lucky break. Two researchers at Yeshiva University uncovered an obscure opinion published in 1908 by a Hungarian rabbi that said it was permissible to exhume the foot of an amputee buried in a non-Jewish cemetery to rebury in a Jewish one.
Lamm and Rabbi Schacter brought the opinion to Rabbi Osher Weiss — and were stunned to learn that the author of the 100year-old opinion, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Glick, was Rabbi Weiss’ great-great-grandfather.
Rabbi Weiss declared what
Lamm and Rabbi Schacter had in mind for Baskind was, in fact, kosher.
On Memorial Day last year, on an unrelated trip to the Normandy and Brittany to install three Jewish headstones at American cemeteries, Lamm and Schacter led a delegation of 60 American Jews — 20 of whom were the children of Holocaust survivors — on a secret mission to the German war cemetery to visit Baskind’s grave, the fallen lieutenant’s first Jewish visitors in 79 years.
At his grave, they recited the Mourner’s Kaddish and sang other Jewish prayers and songs.
“Everybody cried, everybody,” Lamm said, “It was a magical, very sad, very emotional moment.”
Ancestors’ blessing
Prior to the trip, Lamm sought the blessing of Lt. Baskind’s great-niece, Samantha Baskind, a professor of art history and Holocaust studies at Cleveland University.
She had one request: “Would you put a stone there for me?”
That small, traditional gesture of placing a stone at a Jewish grave — which the Talmud says helps “keep a soul down in this world” — had great repercussions, he said.
In a meeting with German Brig. Gen. Dirk Backen, Lamm played a video of Baskind’s great-niece imploring him to allow Operation Benjamin to exhume his body.
“Knowing that he’s been buried in a German cemetery, so far from home and under a cross is a jagged scar for my family,” Professor Baskind said.
Permission to exhume was finally granted.
Over the course of three days in mid-December, a team of 17, including French and German anthropologists and experts from the University of Wisconsin, worked to dig up the gravesite at Marigny.
“I felt terrified,” Lamm said, “It’s great to talk about it in theory but what if we’re wrong? What if we can’t find him? This is our one and only shot.”
There were 10,000 bones buried in the mass grave and it was unknown how many would be viable for DNA testing.
“We were exhausted, out of our minds,” Lamm said. “The grave itself was soaked in water, the dirt was the worst soil condition you could have.
“At every stage our chances of success get lower and lower and lower. It was looking very bleak.”
After extracting an “enormous amount of bones” and separating the potential matches for Baskind, the rest of the remains had to be reburied. A German official enlisted Lamm, an orthodox Jew, to lead the service for the 52 German soldiers.
“I had a moment of panic,” Lamm confessed. “You can’t make up a more surreal . . . circumstance.”
‘Long-awaited solace’
Speaking at the grave, Lamm recounted the practice of spilling drops of wine on Passover as a symbol that they do not exalt in the demise of their enemies.
“You are those drops of wine,” Lamm said of the fallen Germans.
Four weeks later, the moment of truth arrived. DNA lab results came back and revealed the recovered bones were a 99.989% match with DNA samples provided by Baskind’s surviving family members.
After 79 years, Lt. Baskind was finally found.
“The recovery of my great uncle . . . is almost surreal . . . It brings a measure of long-awaited solace to my family,” Samantha Baskind said.
She received her great-uncle’s Purple Heart from the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency on May 22.
The German Army formally handed over the remains to the US Army in a ceremony at Ramstein Airforce Base on May 28.
On June 23, the 80th anniversary of his death, Lt. Baskind will be buried at the American cemetery in Normandy with full military honors in a Jewish ceremony presided over by Rabbi Schacter.
At the Wall of the Missing, to signify he is the 25th soldier to be recovered out of 1,551, Professor Baskind will insert a gold rosette with a red stone next to her uncle’s name.